Two Rex Plays #11 - Dice Throne
In this edition of Two Rex Plays we’re discussing the original Dice Throne, a roll & fight game designed by Nate Chatellier and Manny Trembley and published by Roxley Games. Pick from a diverse cast of characters, roll custom dice to activate an attack from your thematic move set, and chip away at your opponent’s health whilst defending your own.
Here are the design features we liked:
Combat system – Dice Throne is the most famous example of the ‘Battle Yahtzee’ dice combat system where you match the symbols on the dice to activate a set of powers that are unique to your character. The rarer the roll, the more destructive the attack. Dice Throne’s implementation of this system includes 5 custom dice, a large number of powers to choose from on your character sheet, and a deck of ‘effect’ cards. The end result is that you’ll always be able to activate a power on your turn, and the chances are good you’ll activate something significantly more powerful, or at least feel like you came close.
Yahtzee dice rolling – The game adopts a Yahtzee style approach to rolling dice, so that you roll all five dice initially, but then you have the option of keeping some of the dice and re-rolling others a further two times. There’s something immensely satisfying about ‘banking’ a few good dice from your first roll and then pushing your luck to chase something better. The trade-off is that it increases the length of the game, but on balance this adds more to the game than it takes away.
Diverse & thematic brawlers – One of the main reasons to come back to Dice Throne is to play through the cast of characters, each of which has a completely different and thematic move set alongside its own set of custom dice and upgrade cards. That makes the game feel different each time and encourages different ways of playing. It also provided Roxley with a natural way to expand the game by introducing new sets of characters.
Striking art – The artwork, by Gavan Brown and Manny Trembley, is fantastic and gives the game great table presence. This is helped by the player boards which give significant space to the character illustration, allowing the artwork to play a prominent role in the game (it also serves a secondary purpose as somewhere to stack status effects). It almost feels opulent to give so much space on the table over to character illustrations, but the artwork is more than up to the task, and it helps to break-up what could otherwise be a dull grid of ability cards.
Forward momentum – The game is conscious of sticking to its 20-40 min run time, and there are a number of design features that help the battle to keep moving towards an ultimate victor. For example, unblockable damage and defensive moves that only tend to block a proportion of damage rather than a total cancellation. More generally, the ratio of attack moves to defensive moves is heavily weighted toward attack, so the conversation at the end of each turn is how much damage you’ve inflicted, not whether you’ve damaged at all.
This final point has resonance with our own project, which we’re loosely classifying as a flip & write & roll. We started out with a design philosophy to create games that are fun, quick to get into, strategically satisfying - but done and dusted after 30 mins. What we’ve found is that it’s far too easy to start introducing new systems and mechanisms that help with the fun & strategic element but send the play time spiralling.
Interested in Dice Throne? Find out more here:
Official TTS mod
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=908560170
Roxley Games website